7th Edition of Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency

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Government statistics are widely used to inform decisions by policymakers, program administrators, businesses and other organizations as well as households and the general public. Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency, Seventh Edition will assist statistical agencies and units, as well as other agencies engaged in statistical activities, to carry out their responsibilities to provide accurate, timely, relevant, and objective information for public and policy use. This report will also inform legislative and executive branch decision makers, data users, and others about the characteristics of statistical agencies that enable them to serve the public good.

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138 pages · 6 x 9 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-68114-6
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-68115-4
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/25885

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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency: Seventh Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Robert M. Groves

Robert M. Groves (NAS/NAM) (chair) is executive vice president and provost of Georgetown University, where he is also the Gerard J. Campbell professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and a professor in the Department of Sociology. Prior to joining Georgetown as provost, he served as director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 2009 to 2012 after being appointed by President Barack Obama. Previously, he was director of the University of Michigan Survey Research Center and research professor at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. He also served as associate director for research and methodology of the U.S. Census Bureau from 1990 to 1992. His research focuses on the effects of the mode of data collection on responses in sample surveys, the social and political influences on survey participation, the use of adaptive research designs to improve the cost and error properties of statistics, and how public concerns about privacy affect attitudes toward statistical agencies. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in the Social and Political Sciences Section and the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) in the Social Sciences, Humanities and Law Section. He served as a member of CNSTAT from 2000 to 2006, as a member of DBASSE from 2014 to 2016, and has served on numerous Academies boards, panels, and committees, including chair of the Panel to Review Programs of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS); member of the Committee on Revisions to the Common Rule for the Protection of Human Subjects in Research in the Behavioral and Social Sciences: A Workshop; and the Workshop Steering Committee on Enhancing Research and Development for the Federal Statistical System, among others. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has an A.B. in sociology from Dartmouth College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan.

Anne C. Case

Anne Case (NAM) is the Alexander Stewart 1886 professor of economics and public affairs emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. She is also the director of the Research Program in Development Studies at Princeton. Her current research examines the relationship between economic status and health status over the lifecourse in developed and developing countries. Her research on midlife morbidity and mortality is summarized in her book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press 2020). She served on the Academies’ Committee on Population (CPOP) in the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education from 2005 to 2008; the NIH National Research Advisory Council, Child Health and Human Development (2014-18); and the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science (2017-19). She is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine. She has a B.S. from the State University of New York, Albany, an M.P.A. from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.

Janet Currie

Janet Currie (NAS/NAM) is Henry Putnam professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and co-director of Princeton's Center for Health and Wellbeing. She also co-directs the Program on Families and Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research focuses on health and well-being, primarily of children. She has written about early intervention programs, programs to expand health insurance and improve health care, public housing, and food and nutrition programs. Much of this research is summarized in her book, The Invisible Safety Net: Protecting the Nation's Poor Children and Families (Princeton University Press, 2006). Her current research focuses on socioeconomic differences in health, environmental threats to health, and mental health. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) in 2013 and serves in the Social Sciences, Humanities and Law Section. She served on the Board on Children, Youth and Families from 2012 to 2014 and the Committee on Population from 2001 to 2004, and has served on several National Academies committees on the promotion of well-being of children and families. She has served as a consultant for the National Health Interview Survey and the National Longitudinal Surveys, and on the advisory board of the National Children's Study. She was elected vice president of the American Economic Association in 2010. She is a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, an affiliate of the University of Michigan's National Poverty Center, an affiliate of IZA in Bonn, Germany and the recipient of an honorary degree from the University of Lyon in France. She is on the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science and has served as the editor of the Journal of Economic Literature and on the editorial board of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has also served several other journals in an editorial capacity including the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Public Economics. She has a B.A. and M.A. in economics from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.

Donald A. Dillman

Donald A. Dillman is Regents professor in the Department of Sociology at Washington State University. He also serves as the deputy director for research and development in the Social and Economic Sciences Research Center at Washington State University. From 1991 to 1995, he served as the senior survey methodologist in the Office of the Director at the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2000, he received the Roger Herriot Award for Innovation in Federal Statistics for his work at the Census Bureau. He is recognized internationally as a major contributor to the development of modern mail, telephone, and internet survey methods. Throughout his time at Washington State University, he has maintained an active research program on the improvement of survey methods and how information technologies influence rural development. He has served as investigator on more than 80 grants and contracts worth approximately $12.5 million, and written 13 books and more than 235 other publications. He holds numerous memberships in professional organizations, including the American Sociological Association, and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Statistical Association. He served as past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research and the Rural Sociological Society. He chaired the Academies Panel on Redesigning the BLS Consumer Expenditures Surveys; served as a member of the Panel on Redesigning the Commercial Building and Residential Energy Consumption Surveys; the Panel on Residence Rules in the Decennial Census; and the Survey of Earned Doctorates Advisory Panel. He has a B.A. in agronomy, an M.S. in rural sociology, and a Ph.D. in sociology, all from Iowa State University.

Diana Farrell

Diana Farrell is the founding president and chief executive officer of the JPMorgan Chase Institute. Previously, she was the global head of the McKinsey Center for Government, providing research, proprietary data and other tools to support government leaders focused on improving performance. In addition, she was a leader of McKinsey’s Global Public Sector Practice and a member of their Partner Review Committee. She served in the White House as deputy director of the National Economic Council and deputy assistant to the President on Economic Policy from 2009-2011. During her tenure, she led interagency processes and stakeholder management on a broad portfolio of economic initiatives, including financial reform, housing and innovation. She also coordinated stakeholder engagement around the passage of the historic Dodd-Frank Act and served as a member of the President’s Auto Recovery Task Force. Prior to serving in the Obama Administration, she was the head of the McKinsey Global Institute. Under her leadership, the Institute published extensively on the topics of productivity; competitiveness and growth; global financial system evolution and capital market developments; labor markets; healthcare systems; and energy. Ms. Farrell earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Robert M. Goerge

Robert M. Goerge is a Chapin Hall senior research fellow with more than 30 years experience in research focused on improving the available data and information on children and families, particularly those who require specialized services related to maltreatment, disability, poverty, or violence. Goerge leads Chapin Hall’s Integrated Database on Child and Family Programs in Illinois, which links state and municipal administrative data on social service receipt, education, criminal and juvenile justice, employment, healthcare, and early childhood programs to provide a comprehensive picture of child and family use of publicly provided or publicly financed service programs. His work provides high-quality information to policymakers, particularly at the state and local level, to improve the programs serving children and their families. At Chapin Hall, he is principal investigator (PI) for the Family Self-Sufficiency Data Center, funded by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; PI of the Linking Federal Data to Local Data project, which is a collaboration with the U.S. Census Bureau; and was PI of the first National Survey for Early Care and Education. He is also co-chair and co-founder of the International Society for Child Indicators. In addition to his Chapin Hall work, Goerge is a senior fellow at the Computation Institute, where he was co-PI on a NSF-funded grant titled, “An Urban Sciences Research Coordination Network for Data-Driven Urban Design and Analysis.” He is the founder of the Master’s Degree on Computational Analysis and Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He has been a member of the National Academies’ panel on Data and Methods for Measuring the Effects of Changes in Social Welfare Programs and the panel on Modernizing Crime Statistics, and a technical work group member of the National Study of Child and Adolescent Well-Being. He is a senior fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy. Goerge received his M.A. and Ph.D. in social policy from The University of Chicago.

Hilary Hoynes

Hilary Hoynes is professor of public policy and economics and holds the Haas distinguished chair in economic disparities at the University of California Berkeley where she also co-directs the Berkeley Opportunity Lab. Her research focuses on poverty, inequality, food and nutrition programs, and the impacts of government tax and transfer programs on low income families. Current projects include evaluating the effects of access to the social safety net in early life on later life health and human capital outcomes, examining the effects of the Great Recession on poverty, and the role of the safety net in mitigating income losses. Hoynes is a member of the American Academy of Art and Sciences and a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. She has served as co-editor of the American Economic Review and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and is on the editorial board of the American Economic Review: Insights. She served on the National Academies’ committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years (2017-2019). Hoynes received her B.A. in economics and mathematics from Colby College, and her Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.

Daniel Kifer

Daniel Kifer is associate professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering and a member of the graduate faculty in the Social Data Analytics Department at The Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Kifer’s research interests include statistical privacy, machine learning, computational social science, and deep learning. He has won an influential paper award at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering and has developed some of the disclosure avoidance techniques used by the U.S. Census Bureau. His research has been supported by NSF, Google, Xerox, NVIDIA, Adobe, and Yahoo. Dr. Kifer has a Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Sharon Lohr

Sharon Lohr is a professor emerita at Arizona State University, where she was dean's distinguished professor of statistics until 2012. From 2012 to 2017, as a vice president at Westat, she developed survey designs and statistical analysis methods for use in transportation, public health, crime measurement, and education. Her research interests include sample surveys, design of experiments, hierarchical models, and combining multiple sources of data. She is the author of numerous research articles as well as the books Sampling: Design and Analysis and Measuring Crime: Behind the Statistics. She is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and the inaugural recipient of the Gertrude M. Cox Statistics Award for contributions to the practice of statistics. Her invited presentations include selection as the Morris Hansen Lecturer and the Deming Lecturer. Dr. Lohr has served on two National Academies committees: the Panel on Improving Federal Statistics for Policy and Social Science Research Using Multiple Data Sources and State-of-the-Art Estimation Methods (2015-2017) and the Panel on the Functionality and Usability of Data from the American Community Survey (2004-2007). She earned her B.S. degree in mathematics from Calvin College, and her Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Thomas L. Mesenbourg

Thomas L. Mesenbourg retired as acting director of the U.S. Census Bureau in August 2013. He served as deputy director from May 2008-August 2012. Before being named deputy director, he was associate director for economic programs, with responsibility for the Economic Directorate’s myriad programs, including the Economic Census and the Census of Governments and over 100 monthly, quarterly, and annual surveys. He joined the Census Bureau in 1972. In 2004, he received a Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Senior Executives, government’s highest award for career executives. In October 2012, he received the Roger W. Jones Award from American University for exceptional leadership among people who devoted themselves to federal public service, and in 2011 he received the Julius Shiskin Award for economic statistics. He has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Boston University and an M.A. in economics from Pennsylvania State University.

Sarah M. Nusser

Sarah M. Nusser is vice president for research at Iowa State University (ISU) and professor in the department of statistics. As vice president for research, she leads efforts to advance and support the research mission at ISU through campus-wide programs for fostering faculty research development, new research initiatives, and new interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations. Her research interests include using geospatial data in survey data collection and estimation, sampling and estimation methods for agricultural and natural resource surveys, and sample design and measurement error in surveys. She is a faculty member in ISU’s Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology (CSSM) and in interdepartmental graduate programs for ecology and evolutionary biology and human computer interaction. Prior tobecoming vice president of research, she served as the director of the CSSM for 15 years, where she conducted research in survey statistics and methodology with various agencies within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, including the Natural Resource Conservation Service, the National Agricultural Statistics Service, the Economic Research Service, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. She also completed research on projects with the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. She has served on numerous National Academies committees, including the Workshop on the Food Availability Data System and Estimates of Food Loss; the Panel on Redesigning the BLS Consumer Expenditures Surveys; the Panel on Estimating Children Eligible for School Nutrition Programs Using the American Community Survey; and the Committee on Social Security Representative Payees. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and has received awards for excellence and service from Iowa State and the American Statistical Association. She has a B.S. in botany from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.S. in botany from North Carolina State University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in statistics from Iowa State University.

Jerome P. Reiter

Jerome P. (Jerry) Reiter is department chair and professor of statistical science at Duke University. He participatesin both applied and methodological research in statistics, and is most interested in applications involving social science and public policy. His methodological research focuses mainly on data confidentiality, missing data, combining information from multiple sources, and analyzing complex data. He previously served on the National Academies Panel on Addressing Priority Technical Issues for the Next Decade of the American Community Survey--First Phase (CNSTAT); the Committee on the Long-Term Stewardship of Safety Data from the Second Strategic Highway Research Program (TRB); and the Panel on Collecting, Storing, Accessing, and Protecting Biological Specimens and Biodata in Social Surveys (CNSTAT/CPOP). He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He is the editor of the journal, Statistics and Public Policy. He has a B.S. in mathematics from Duke University, and an A.M. and Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University.

Judith A. Seltzer

Judith A. Seltzer is professor of sociology and past director of the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, she was on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she contributed to the development and implementation of the National Survey of Families and Households. Her research interests include kinship patterns, intergenerational obligations, relationships between nonresident fathers and children, and how legal institutions and other policies affect family change. She is especially interested in kinship institutions that are in flux, such as marriage and cohabitation in the contemporary United States or divorced and non-marital families. She also explores ways to improve the quality of survey data on families, and in 2013 Seltzer and her colleagues added a module with family rosters to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to provide new data on U.S. family networks. She currently serves on the CNSTAT Standing Committee on Reengineering Census Operations, and she previously served on the Panel on Residence Rules in the Decennial Census, the Panel on the Design of the 2010 Census Program of Evaluations and Experiments, and the Panel to Review the 2010 Census. She was president of the Population Association of America in 2016, and she previously served on the Board of Overseers for the General Social Survey. She has a B.A. in sociology from Princeton University and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan.

C. Matthew Snipp

C. Matthew Snipp is Burnet C. and Milfred Finley Wohlford professor of sociology at Stanford University. At Stanford, he currently serves as director of the Secure Data Center, deputy director of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, and chair of the Native American Studies program. He has written extensively on American Indians, focusing specifically on the interaction of American Indians and the U.S. census. He currently serves on the CNSTAT Standing Committee on Reengineering Census Operations and the Standing Committee for the American Opportunity Study-Phase 1. Previously, he served as a member of the Panel to Review the 2010 Census, the Panel on Residence Rules in the Decennial Census, the Panel on the Research on Future Census Methods, and as co-chair of the Steering Committee for a Workshop on Developing a New National Survey on Social Mobility. He has also served on the Census Bureau’s Technical Advisory Committee on Racial and Ethnic Statistics and the Native American Population Advisory Committee. He is the former director of the Center for Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity. Prior to moving to Stanford, he was associate professor and professor of rural sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he held affiliate appointments with several other units, and assistant and associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. He has a M.S. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Jeannette M. Wing

Jeannette Wing is Avanessians director of the Data Science Institute and professor of computer science at Columbia University. She came to Columbia in July 2017 from Microsoft, where she served as corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, overseeing a global network of research labs. She is widely recognized for her intellectual leadership in computer science, particularly in trustworthy computing. Her areas of research expertise include security and privacy; formal methods; programming languages; and distributed and concurrent systems. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. She has served as both a member and chair for the National Academies’ Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (2002-2007), and she has served as a member of the committee on Innovation in Information Technology (2002-2003) and the Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism: Panel for Information Technology (2001-2003). She holds a S.B in computer science and engineering, a S.M. in electrical engineering and computer science, and a Ph.D. in computer science, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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7th Edition of Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency

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7th Edition of Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency

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Featured publication

Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency: Seventh Edition

Description

Collaborators

Committee

Sponsors

Staff

Parent projects

Committee on National Statistics

Major units and sub-units

Contact

Contact us

Provide feedback

Request materials

More like this

Review of the draft United by Nature assessment

Modernizing Mathematics Education for Grades 9-14

Health Care Financing to Improve Availability of Affordable Contraception: Identifying Promising Practices

National Cooperative Highway Research Program

Review of the draft United by Nature assessment

Modernizing Mathematics Education for Grades 9-14

Social and Economic Systems Program Area

Peer Review of the Marine Recreational Information Program Data Standards

Enhancing Scientific Integrity: Progress and Opportunities in the Social and Behavioral Sciences - A Workshop